The Streisand effect is the phenomenon whereby an attempt to hide, remove, or censor a piece of information has the unintended consequence of publicizing the information more widely, usually facilitated by the Internet.

Something like that could seriously place job promotions or prospects in jeopardy. If could ruin a legitimate business just with the controversy hanging out there associated with the name even though he was vindicated in the end.

> I don't think the EU decision will actually work, and TFA is proof of it.

The goal of the EU ruling is not to erase the stories from the net. It is simply to make it harder to find, If the goal were to erase, they would require the site actually hosting the story to take it down, not just remove the entry in google's database.

It used to be that we had a form of privacy due to our data being hard to find. Property ownership records in a cabinet at the local tax assessor's office, arrest records at the country jail, birth, death, marriage records at the town, etc. The information was still public but the effort required to access it was a significant barrier to abuse. It was a good trade-off between making the information public and protecting privacy.

The EU is trying to approximate that balance. All the people who complain that it won't "work" are defining the problem wrong. It isn't a situation where black or white will work, but grey might.

I think the key is that we need to find a balance between the right to privacy and the right to be forgotten.

Ludicrous story in the paper only designed to make headlines by slandering you? Sure, let's forget aboutYou were charged with a crime but did your time and are back in society? Sure, let's forget about it and let you get back to being a member of society. (Otherwise we might as well just brand criminals on the forehead)You're a big company that had an oil spill but want to rewrite history? Let's not forget

"THIS. All of the stories on this decision seem to be focusing on people who are clearly bad or did terrible things in the past."

Exactly.

People on Slashdot are quick to slap down politicians who use the "think of the children!" argument and cry "paedophile!" when they want justification for their bullshit, yet it seems to go completely undetected when Slashdot does the exact same thing:

"That decision has resulted in takedown requests from convicted sex offenders and huge banking companies, among thousands of others.""

So it's okay to cry sex offender and so forth when it suits or what? There is absolutely zero balance in this wording, it's about as loaded a statement as you can get. Not only does it use shock terms like "sex offender" it also simply says it has resulted in take down notices. This doesn't mean that any of them were actually adhered to, if Google is adhering to take down notices from huge banking companies then it's doing it wrong because companies aren't protected by the European Data Protection Directive which is what this law is about. Only private individuals are, and even then not if there is a clear public interest in keeping the data up (i.e. a corrupt politician).

So, dear Slashdot, please don't resort to the same type of shit I'd expect from a corrupt or ignorant politician and Fox News, it's not helpful. I guess it may not completely be Slashdot's fault beyond their usual failure to edit. I guess it could be that the submitter is just a complete idiot, but all the same, not here please, if I wanted biased idiocy I'd go straight to Fox, The Daily Mail or The Register or something equally full of mindless incorrect dross.

Indeed. WayBackMachine respects robots.txt retroactively, which is insane in my opinion, because it means what WayBackMachine says the web looked like in, say 1999, can change at any moment. For example, if WayBackMachine has 10 years of archived data for a site which then comes under new management that decides it wants to erase that history, they can just put up a robots.txt on the current site, and WayBackMachine will not only stop serving the current version of the site, it will also stop serving all the previous ten years of data. This happened to the original jumptheshark.com, for example.